Frasier Crane, c'est moi.

Hang the DJs, #8

Thesis 1: My reading of contemporary practices of social music production, especially in the figure of the electronic music DJ, relies primarily on a thorough and on-going reading of Adorno, Benjamin, Kittler, Freud, etc., which makes me capable of assessing the aesthetic, political, and social consequences of these figures in ways that very few club-goers are. It may, then, be incumbent upon me to argue against club culture in so far as I think it promotes the following: sexual violence; capitalism; social conformity; mindless obedience; bad dancing; cultures of exclusion based on hegemonic categories of social desirability; bad taste.

Counterargument I: There are people who know this theory shit at least as well as I do and love clubbing.

Thesis II: The fact that I have always hated this music, and hated almost all forms of clubbing available to me in Berlin, stems not from any particular intellectual conviction, but rather from my own feelings of social and especially sexual inadequacy when I inhabit these spaces and that I therefore invoke my cultural capital in order to distance myself from the aesthetic/social/political possibilities of a kind of engagement that threaten to reveal my own inadequacies to me.

Counterargument II: This reliance on the psychological to respond to what are, essentially, intellectual critiques of certain kinds of aesthetic practices answers none of them and makes future debate impossible; the projection of certain probably unknowable (even by me) psychological connections and literary and aesthetic conclusions makes all philosophical (or philosophicalish) activity a mere projection of certain psychological states.

Thesis III: All of the above.

Counterargument III: All knowledge and conviction about any not purely empirical subject is impossible for everyone always. Cf. Pyrrhonian skepticism.